What:

What is it like to work on your frontline? To take frustrated customer calls all day long? To work the front desk? To clean the bathrooms? Set aside one day each month to work a frontline job yourself.

What:

The way you communicate with the frontline will change. The training programs you design will change. And your messages and requests will have far more credibility when they are grounded in personal experience.

What:

Your executives have a lot of priorities - why should they focus on customer experience improvements? Build a plan to make your C-Suite your biggest advocates. Connect customer experience to the metrics they care about most. Equip them with the anecdotes they need to articulate impact.

Why:

Most people are reactive, building one-off presentations when requested. But if you are always ready, always seeding program impact and anecdotes, your influence is more profound. Put your C-Suite engagement plan into action.

What:

Maybe you could upsell and cross-sell more products and services if your customers understood why they were important. If you are in a complex space, take the time to educate your customers and help them make better decisions.

Why:

State Farm just opened a coffee shop in Chicago where it sells not insurance. It uses the space to run insurance product workshops that educate customers on policies. Home Depot runs multiple DIY classes every week at each location. These classes foster knowledge, interest, and consumption.

What:

Customers want what they pay for. But then you supply a little something extra... an unexpected bonus. How can you offer the equivalent of an amuse-bouche at a fine restaurant? That one bite can have a huge impact on the customer experience and perception of value.

Why:

Mink is a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver. You order your espresso or cappuccino, and when the barista hands you your drink, he or she also hands you a small, beautifully wrapped square of dark chocolate. Made in-house, it's a sweet reward that makes the customer feel special, and it builds loyalty in a competitive market.

What:

Based on what you know about your customers, personify each segment. Create characters and give them names (Kevin, Annie, Sv en, etc.). Assign them known demographics, interests, and behaviors. Make them real.

Why:

Spreadsheets of customer data or more abstract segments can produce impersonal decisions. When customer segments come to life, it helps you better consider their wants and needs. It's more natural to optimize for "Kevin" than for "males aged 18-34."

What:

Many of the world's most customer-centric companies are very open about the kinds of customers they do NOT serve. For example, Southwest does not serve business-class flyers. In your business, some customer segments are simply not desirable. How do you build your customer experience to discourage these individuals from engaging your products and people?

Why:

Don't water down your customer experience so as not to offend less desirable or profitable customers. You might be missing the opportunity to more closely engage your best customers. Be clear about which customers you want and which you don't want.

What:

List 10 celebrities. These can be movie stars, athletes, businesspeople, musicians, or others. Now think about how each individual would experience. How would Clint Eastwood react to the experience at your club? What would Elton John say about your on-hold music?

Why:

An exercise like this is mostly about having fun. It'll get you thinking about some extreme personalities rather than your typical customer set. And while you may not want to cater to Clint and Elton, seeing things through their eyes may inspire more far-reaching ideas.

What:

It's frustrating when you make an online purchase and the next thing you know, you've been subscribed to a dozen email newsletters. When customers trust you with their contact information, how do you follow up? Consider ways you can focus on the customer's specific interests rather than offering generic messages. This can be done by using the filters in MXM to create unique customer profiles. Consider filtering based on Fitness Results, Personal Training, Group Exercise, Business Practices.

Why:

Your customers have given you permission to market to them. Use it wisely. Rather than trying to prevent customers from unsubscribing, think about how your follow-up communications can encourage customers to engage even more deeply.

What:

Do your customers know each other? You are a common bond. Can you facilitate opportunities for them to interact? The concept of the "mesh" of crowd-sharing is alive and well.

Example:

NeighborGoods.net makes it easy for real-life neighbors to meet and share ladders, lawnmowers, and helping hands. Airbnb.com helps people find space (a house, a room, a sleeping bag) in other people's homes. Once upon a time, Saturn held annual reunions and factory tours for new car buyers.

What:

Segment your customers into three groups: Detractors, Passives and Promoters. Identify the percentage of your customers that each group represents. Define the value of each group to your company based on how much they spend per visit, per month, per year, or over a lifetime. Now answer the question: What is the business impact of transforming 10% of Detractors to Promoters?

Why:

The answer to this question defines the world of opportunity created by greater customer satisfaction. Pin one big, aspirational number on satisfaction

What:

Identify one element of your experience that you can personalize for your customer. Consider the barista who knows and readies your favorite drink, or the car service that tunes your stereo to your favorite radio station. How can you demonstrate to your customers that you really know their tastes?

Why:

Prove that you listen and that you care about the customer's comfort. That builds loyalty. Once you capture that first element, it becomes the foundation for a closer customer relationship.

What:

Choose one interaction in your customer experience. Now benchmark the company that is the best at this interaction. Not in your industry, but on the planet. Look for all companies that are excellent at that single interaction.

Why:

Too many companies benchmark customer experience leaders only in their industry. Thought leaders benchmark outside their industry and leapfrog their peers.

Tip:

Take a look at your MXM Score Card. Scroll to the bottom of the page and see the average NPS scores for Hospitality and Retail.

What:

In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explains the power of first impressions. What first impression are you offering your customers? When they walk into your location, what's the first thing customers see? When they call, what's the first thing they hear? Now work backward. Define the ideal first impression and determine what you need to do to deliver time and time again.

Why:

Sometimes we design experiences, and the first impression is the outcome. However, you can flip that approach; start with the first impression and then reinforce it.

What:

Who are your best customer service representatives - based on customer satisfaction scores, staff friendliness scores and other criteria? If you don't have the data, ask around. When you find those top representatives, ask them what they do and how they do it. Then shadow them and watch them do it.

Why:

Your representatives are closest to the customers, and many understand how to drive customer satisfaction. They have the secret sauce; you just need to capture the recipe. Plus, should you embed their best practices in training, the fact that the idea originated at the frontline adds instant credibility.

What:

Imagine your customer experience in the year 2020. How will social and technological trends transform the experience? There are no limiting factors. Imagine how you will engage your customers in 2020, and write the story.

Why:

It's fun to stretch your imagination. You'll be wrong (inevitable), and that's okay. But looking far out sometimes sparks an idea that you can reel in to the present day. You are officially a visionary!

What:

What film title best represents your current customer experience? Brainstorm. "Nightmare on Elm Street"? "An Inconvenient Truth"? "Groundhog day"? "As Good as It Gets"?

Why:

OK, what genre did you land in? Comedy, romance, suspense, or something else? Think about your ideal genre and write the perfect title. You see where this can go. Next craft the trailer. Write the script. Create an award winner.

What:

Ready a spreadsheet. Calculate the percentage of "alerts" that remain unresolved for a longer-than-acceptable period. Assess the percentage of negative social media reviews that receive a response. Determine how good you are at closing the loop. Start your investigation using the stats page.

Why:

Recovering frustrated customers drives revenue now and in the future. Of customers who post negative social media reviews, 96% have two or more failed service interactions. If companies close the loop effectively the first time, they save themselves public pain.

For MXM Customers

If you are an MXM customer, you can use the health check tab to see the percentage of alerts that have gone overdue. Simply select the health check tab and then select the subtab labeled engagement health

What:

If you are listening to the voices of your customers, they're probably contributing a lot of ideas. How do you know when they've contributed a good idea? You have to use case management. Define with your team what would distinguish an exceptional customer contribution.

Why:

Utilize the benefits of case management to automatically organize what you are learning. If your team starts surfacing great ideas to leadership you will be alerted whenever something great has been suggested.

What:

Create a list of everything that can go wrong as a customer interacts with your end-to-end experience. Consider all touch points, from first contact to on-going usage, across all programs and services.

Why:

Now look at the list through two lenses. First, which failures are most severe, and how can you avoid them? Second, which failures are most in your control, and what changes can you make to mitigate their impact?